Eureka Moment!
I'm not sure why it happens or how it happens but once in a while, a bolt of inspiration will strike me. Last night, I was lost about this non-fiction book on Chinese inventions. There was just so much ground to cover and no way to hold everything together, which resulted in a complete meltdown when I tried to tackle the revision of the introduction. I shut down early yesterday and played on-line poker for the rest of the evening. Having a slightly obsessive personality is not good when it comes to playing games.
Anyway, this morning, I started to skim one of my research books and the primer for the book hit me right between the eyes. Necessity is the mother of invention. That's my spine. As long as I use this primer, I'll be able to figure out what to put in the book and what to leave out. Now I know what the introduction needs to do. It has to set up the reader for how the Chinese were a pragmatic people, and that many of the inventions (the ones I'll include in the book) came out of a need to be more efficient.
Where did this inspiration come from? I have no idea. It just hit me as I was going through one of the books. I think I was reading a passage about how Chinese writing was up and down because the original writing surface were sticks of bamboo, and it was necessary to write up and down. The Chinese invented a paper-making process so that their scholars wouldn't have to deal with the cumbersome bamboo. And that led me to think that all the inventions that I want to put into the book have to have some relevance to necessity and pragmatic thinking.
If I were to pull any lesson out of this, I'd have to say that if I'm ever stumped again, I should play poker more often... or just do more research. I think immersing myself into the world of China's innovations helped me to think laterally and come up with the primer. Yay!
I'm going to work on the introduction this weekend and put it to rest before I have to slide back into The Forbidden Phoenix revisions... ugh... that will happen Monday. Can you tell I'm not looking forward to revising the play yet again? Sigh. Almost there... almost there... almost there to a nervous breakdown.